Author’s notes: This is a conglomeration of stuff from Del Toro’s film (beware of SPOILERS) and the original Mignola comics. What’s not theirs’ is mine. I'm not planning on repeating this disclaimer on every chapter.

Trevor Bruttenholm, for whom the concept of family was an important one, ended up bereft of family by his early twenties; first bereaved, early on, by parents emotionally incapable of caring for him, then by the death in 1936 of the loving grandfather who raised him. He only ever loved one woman, but her parents’ objections to his social class and her subsequent death in 1938 crushed any hopes he may have had in that union.

An early interest in folklore, legends, and the paranormal coupled with an adolescent conversion to Catholicism led Trevor to a life long interest in the supernatural. He attended, in his home country of England, a famous university and was mentored in his early studies by Professor Mark Peters, a Catholic expert in folklore and the paranormal, who unfortunately passed away before Trevor graduated in 1937.

After the enforced separation from his fiancée, Trevor continued pursuing his studies on folklore abroad, often returning to many of the same locations he had traveled to in his adolescent years with his grandfather. He returned to England on learning of his fiancée’s illness, but she died before he arrived. He vowed on her grave never again to be concerned with the fate of his own soul, but that of the entire world.

In 1944 Trevor permanently relocated to the United States where his surname was often spelled phonetically as ‘Broom’. Official records are unclear exactly where he resided until placing him in the New York borough of Brooklyn in the early 1960s where he resided while a noted lecturer on folklore at New York University. According to these same official records he never became an American citizen, never married, never had any children, suffered two different bouts with cancer, and was murdered in the year 2004—departing this life as bereft of family as he had been in his early twenties.

However, there is a lot more to Trevor Bruttenholm’s life than is shown in these official records. He was one of those unique individuals who seemed to be able to take the pain and troubles of his life and turn these difficulties into a kind of power. He also seemed uniquely capable of understanding evil and recognizing it in all its forms.

By 1943, at age twenty-seven, Trevor became known worldwide as the preeminent expert on Nazi occultism outside of Germany. It was at this time that he was contacted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to head up the organization that would become the seed for the clandestine FBI Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

It was on December 23, 1944, in the BPRD’s first official field operation, that Trevor Bruttenholm, age twenty-eight, and a handful of American soldiers found themselves on an island off the coast of Scotland.

And it was on this island that Trevor Bruttenholm’s fate jumped into his arms.